AMIA 2024 | Speakers
Adrianne Finelli
Adrianne Finelli is an artist and archival film technician based in the Bay Area. She is currently Project Manager at Prelinger Archives and has been scanning films with the Archives since 2016. Previously she worked as a media specialist in the Department of Film & Media at UC Berkeley, as a film projectionist at SFMOMA, and has taught art and film courses at various universities. Adrianne holds an MFA in Media Arts from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and is from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Agata Zborowska
Agata Zborowska is a cultural historian with a background in cultural studies and visual culture. She completed her PhD at the University of Warsaw. Her research interests lie in the intersection of material culture, property relations, and critical archival studies. She is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Action Fellow at the University of Chicago and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Her project “Critical Archives of Ordinariness: Vernacular Moving Image Practices and Migrant Identity in Polish Chicago” investigates home movies and related oral histories of Polish Chicago before the digital era to challenge and broaden our understanding of evolving migrant and diaspora identities.
Alisha Perdue
Alisha Perdue is the Senior Marketing Manager at Iron Mountain Media & Archive Services, where she helps drive impactful marketing strategies for the media and entertainment industry. With a deep passion for storytelling, Alisha specializes in building partnerships that bring to life the importance of media preservation, digital archiving, and asset management. She excels at identifying collaborative opportunities with customers and industry partners to create engaging narratives that showcase Iron Mountain’s thought leadership, build brand awareness, and highlight our role as trusted stewards of cultural heritage.
Almudena Escobar López
Almudena Escobar López is a scholar, curator, and archivist based in Tkaronto. She is Assistant Professor on Film History, Film Preservation and Collection Management at the School of Image Arts of the Toronto Metropolitan University. She holds a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester, and a MA in Film and Media Preservation from the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation. As a guest curator, Almudena has curated and co-curated a number of film and video series which have been presented at TIFF, Batalha Centro de Cinema, Arsenal, Lincoln Center, Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, Muestra Internacional Documental de Bogotá, Cineteca Nacional de México, among others.
Amanda McQueen
Amanda McQueen is an archivist, historian, and educator at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture (CAHC). She holds an MA in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from New York University and an MA and PhD in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests include media industry history and technology, with a special emphasis on nitrate film, and the musical genre on stage and screen. Amanda has over ten years of teaching experience in higher education and currently oversees CAHC’s graduate assistantship program. She is also a part-time cataloger for the Texas Archive of the Moving Image.
Amy Gallick
Amy Gallick is a Preservation Specialist in the Moving Image Section at the National Audio-visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, VA. She plays a role in many areas of the Moving Image Section’s operations, including acquisitions, preservation, conservation, exhibition, budgeting, purchasing, project management, and contracts, and served on the move team to Culpeper. Amy manages the Charles & Ray Eames Collection, overseeing photochemical and digital restoration projects, coordinating with exhibitors, and serving as a liaison to the Eames Office. Amy has a Bachelor’s Degree in Film Studies and English Literature from the University of Pittsburgh, a certificate in Film Preservation from the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation, and a Master’s Degree in Library and Information Science from Catholic University.
Amy C. Reid
Amy Reid is a PhD Candidate in Film and Digital Media at UCSC, working on a dissertation entitled: Feminist Relationality: Feminist Creative Practices in Filmmaking and Quilting. Reid’s work as a filmmaker examines the intersections between gender, national identities, and labor. By exploring observational approaches and expanding upon formal cinematic notions of time, structure, and narrative, Reid’s work questions how labor is constructed in the filmic form as seen in their film Grandmother’s Garden, which looks at the history of quilting, women’s labor, and US history. Their written dissertation work explores histories of feminist film distribution, collective filmmaking, and screening cultures in Latin America and the US during the long 1970s.
Amy Sloper
Amy Sloper is the Collections Archivist at the Harvard Film Archive, where she manages preservation, cataloging, and access to the archive’s holdings of audiovisual, manuscript, and digital collections. She is a former board member of the Center for Home Movies (2014-2022) and has been an active Community Archiving Workshop member since 2011, including serving as a regional mentor on the IMLS funded “Training of Trainers” project and team leader on the “Assessing and Addressing Digital Readiness for Audiovisual Collections” project funded by the NHPRC.
Andrea Kalas
Andrea is Senior Vice President of Archives at Paramount where she oversees restoration, digitization, digital archives and archive innovation. She was Head of Preservation at the British Film Institute where she preserved the early films of David Lean and built a below freezing film vault; created in-production archiving systems for Discovery Communication; built an archive from scratch at Dreamworks SKG and preserved newsreels at the UCLA Film and Television Archive. She is a former President of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. As a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, she is currently leading an initiative on the digital preservation of motion pictures called Academy Digital Preservation Forum. She won the HPA Outstanding Achievement in Restoration for The Godfather, d. Francis Ford Coppola 1972.
Anicka Austin
Anicka Austin is an Atlanta-based artist who works primarily with experimental movement and archival material. She has a Master of Science in Library Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is currently a collections processing archivist at Emory University’s Rose Library. Her work has been presented by Arts and Entertainment Atlanta (2023), Dance Canvas (2022-2023), the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (2021), Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia ( 2018), Zuckerman Museum of Art’s Fine Arts Gallery (2018), The Lucky Penny (2016-2017), Fulton County Arts and Culture (2017), and Adult Swim (2017).
Anthony Silvestri
Anthony Silvestri is journals manager at the University of Minnesota Press. Prior to joining the Press, he received his Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences from Indiana University. His research has been published in the Moving Image, the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, Porn Studies, and Journal of Film and Video.
Ari Negovschi Regalado
Ari Negovschi Regalado (CalArts ’14, UIUC MS/LIS ’22) is the Technical Director for the Texas Archive of the Moving Image. As the Technical Director, she oversees the lifecycle of audiovisual media digitization and has formed partnerships with Entre Film Center, Project Row Houses, the Orange Show and others to preserve the moving image heritage of Texas. While at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she oversaw the preservation of the Perry Miller Adato papers and films, ca. 1968-1982, a collection of over 4,700 audiovisual assets created by the late documentarian Perry Miller Adato. Prior to her tenure at UIUC, Ari received her BFA from California Institute of the Arts’ Film and Video Program, where she studied analog film and video technologies. She has also worked at the Autry Museum as an Exhibition Media Production Assistant for the award-winning Floral Journey: Native North American Beadwork, the 52nd Chicago International Film Festival, and as a film/video digitization technician at a boutique firm in Chicago.
Ashley Dequilla
Ashley Dequilla is an artist-filmmaker and archivist. In 2023, she obtained her Masters of Fine Arts in Moving Image from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she is currently enrolled as an MA student in Art History. She is a Co-Curator Partner and researcher of the Philippine Heritage Collection at the Field Museum of Natural History. Ashley is the collection manager for the Filipino American Historical Society of Chicago, and works as a moving image archivist to preserve its analog film collection with University of Chicago’s South Side Home Movie Project, securing the National Film Preservation Foundation award in 2024.
Azad Namazie
Azad Namazie (they/them) is a multimedia artist and archivist from Los Angeles. They are the Duplication and Loan Coordinator at UCLA Library Special Collections, overseeing all requests for high-resolution, broadcast-quality files of archival and bibliographic materials, including born-digital materials and digitization of audiovisual materials. They also received their MLIS from UCLA. Azad has previously processed born-digital oral history collections (“Mariachi Musicians in LA” and “Central American Solidarity Movement in the 1980’s”) at the UCLA Center for Oral History Research and helped digitize and preserve tape-based & optical media collections at the Skid Row History Museum & Archive and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Bertram Lyons
Bertram has over 20 years of experience leading consultants and development teams to create innovative, flexible, and user-center software for clients where digital assets are a core function of their organization. Before founding Medex Forensics, Bert served as Managing Director for Software at AVP, an information innovation company. Prior to that, Bert served as a digital archivist for the American Folklife Center (AFC) at the U.S. Library of Congress. Bert has supported complex data and software development projects for organizations globally, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, the JFK Presidential Library Foundation, HBO, Paramount Pictures, University of Kentucky, Indiana University, Yale University, Facebook, and Spotify, among many others. Bert is an Associate Member of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS) and an active member of the Scientific Working Group on Digital Evidence (SWGDE). He has received certification from the Academy of Certified Archivists and is a graduate of the Archives Leadership Institute. He holds an MA in museum studies with a focus in American studies and archival theory from the University of Kansas.
Brian Belak
Brian Belak is a Film Preservationist for the UCLA Film & Television Archive, where he works on preservation and restoration projects that range from the silent era to independent and LGBTQ+ cinema. Brian previously worked as Collections Manager for Chicago Film Archives, and while pursuing an MLIS degree at UCLA, processed the Synanon Foundation films for UCLA Library Special Collections. Brian contributes to annual Home Movie Day events and serves as Board Secretary for the Al Larvick Conservation Fund.
Brian Real
Brian Real (he/him) is an assistant professor in the School of Information Science at the University of Kentucky. He holds a PhD in information studies and a master of library science from the University of Maryland. His primary research areas are the historical impact of federal policy on film preservation and the modern social impact of public libraries on their communities. He is an active member of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), overseeing its Salary and Demographics Survey of the Field and acting as the reviews editor for The Moving Image. Real has published research articles in The Moving Image, Journal of Archival Organization, Public Library Quarterly, Library Quarterly, Information Technology and Libraries, and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television.
C. Díaz
C. Díaz (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist and radical archivist from the Rio Grande Valley, TX, where they co-founded ENTRE Film Center & Regional Archive in 2021. C’s work explores the relationship between cerebral landscapes and the natural environment through the weaving of experimental cinema, social practice, and the reimagining of archives. At ENTRE they hold roles as Archive Project Manager and Artist in Radical Residency (AIRR) Program Facilitator, among other administrative and programming responsibilities. They are on the board for the Center for Home Movies, and serve as a Co-Coordinator of the Mentorship Program at the Association of Moving Image Archivists. C is also the primary caregiver of a 16 years young chihuahua, Néstor, who loves sunbathing and despises car rides.
Camille Townson
Camille Townson is the Processing Archivist at South Side Home Movie Project. They began working with SSHMP in 2022 as an AMIA Pathways Fellow. Camille received their B.S. in Human-Computer Interaction and Design from UC San Diego, and specialize in user experience, digital accessibility, and intimate history-making.
Carin Forman
Carin Forman is a Global Partner Leads at Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Media, Entertainment, Games and Sports (MEGS). Carin’s focus is on partner strategy and enablement and helping customers modernize their content supply chains and unlock new value from their archives. With over 25 years of experience in the industry, Carin brings a deep understanding of the unique challenges facing the media ecosystem. Prior to joining AWS, Carin held leadership roles at prominent companies like HBO and Discovery, Inc., driving innovation in next-generation content management solutions and supply efficiency. Recognized as a thought leader, Carin is a frequent speaker on topics ranging from media supply chain, content delivery, data readiness and media archives.
Casey Keltner
Casey runs the Picture Division of StudioPost, the on-lot Post Production facility in Los Angeles which works on both episodic television and mastering needs for NBCUniversal and content creators across the industry. Casey’s team of professionals and artists focus on color correction, editing, visual effects, dailies, quality control, localization, and film restoration. His organization is on the forefront of all the latest technologies in the space working in 4K, HDR, DolbyVision, etc. Prior to Casey’s last six years at StudioPost he was VP of Post Production for the Cable Entertainment team supporting post production and operations for many of the Comcast owned cable networks– working with E!, Style, G4, Bravo, Esquire, etc. Casey just celebrated his 22nd year at the company.
Cassandra Moore
Cassandra Moore is the Vice President of Mastering and Archive at NBCUniversal and has worked at NBCUniversal since 2004. She is a highly skilled professional in 4K DolbyVision & HDR Mastering, Feature Film Restoration, Production Management, and Process Improvement. Having worked for 30 years with top talent in the entertainment industry, she knows that ensuring films premiere in the best possible format with the highest quality images and sound is important to filmmakers, the industry, and the legacy of Universal Pictures. Restoring and Preserving NBCUniversal’s 112-year-old library is the great honor and passion of Cassandra’s career.
Charlie Hosale
Charlie Hosale is an archivist at the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress, where he processes multi-format archival collections. He has participated in the Federal Agency Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) since 2018. He regularly contributes to the Library’s AV and digital preservation initiatives such as the Recommended Formats Statement. Charlie has worked in academic and corporate archives, including the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Library Archives, MillerCoors, Robert W. Baird and Company, and the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a collaborative project of the Boston public media station GBH and the Library of Congress. He holds a Masters of Library and Information Science and a B.A. in Comparative Literature, both from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has taught classes and given presentations on audiovisual preservation, archive access platforms, automation, and project management. His research interests include audiovisual archives, digital preservation, digitization best practices, music history, and foodways.
Chris Lacinak
As the Founder and CEO of digital asset management consulting firm, AVP (https://weareavp.com), Chris has spent nearly two decades partnering with and guiding over 250 organizations on how to put digital assets at the fingertips of users, making them easier to access, share, protect, and put to good use. In addition to this, Chris is the host of the podcast DAM Right: Winning at Digital Asset Management, which you can find at https://dam-right.com/listen. He also served as an adjunct professor in NYU’s MIAP program for seven years, served multiple terms on the AMIA board, and has chaired AMIA’s Digital Asset Symposium for several years.
Courtney Holschuh
Courtney Holschuh is an Archives Technician in the nitrate film vaults at The Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center where she has been caring for the Library’s vast collection of 145,000 nitrate film reels since 2023. From 2018 to 2023, she was a Senior Film Inspector at the Museum of Modern Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Center. Courtney received a Masters in Library Science from Indiana University in 2018.
Crystal Sanchez
Crystal Sanchez is a media archivist at the Smithsonian Institution on the Digital Asset Management team (DAMS), working with digital audiovisual collections from across the Smithsonian’s diverse Museums, Archives, Libraries, Research Centers, and the Zoo. As a moving image archivist, preservation specialist, and arts professional, her work involves collection management and preservation planning of film, video, and digital assets to ensure current and future access. She loves to stroll through fine art museums and to cook.
Devin Orgeron
Devin Orgeron is emeritus professor of film and Media studies at North Carolina State University where he taught and researched for nearly two decades. Along with numerous articles in the field’s leading journals, he is the author of ROAD MOVIES, co-editor of LEARNING WITH THE LIGHTS OFF, and is editor-in-chief of THE MOVING IMAGE: The journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. Devin and his wife Melissa Dollman co-founded Deserted Films in Palm Springs, California in 2022. A nonprofit home movie archive in the Coachella Valley, Deserted Films cares for and makes available films shot in the area and educates the public on this valuable and often neglected media through public home movie events.
Diana Little
Diana Little directs the Film Department at The MediaPreserve, a laboratory outside of Pittsburgh, PA that specializes in the digitization of archival audiovisual materials. Prior to her time at The MediaPreserve, Diana spent most of a decade working on film restorations at Cineric, Inc. in New York City. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Film Production, History, and Theory from Vassar College and completed the certificate program at the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at George Eastman Museum. She currently serves on the board of the Al Larvick Conservation Fund and has participated in Home Movie Days in New York and Pittsburgh since 2003.
Edward Benoit III
Edward Benoit, III is Associate Director and Associate Professor in the School of Information Studies at Louisiana State University. He coordinates the archival studies and cultural heritage resource management programs. He received an MA in History, MLIS and PhD in Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His research focuses on participatory and community archives, non-traditional archival materials, climate change, and archival education. He is the founder and director of the Virtual Footlocker Project, which examines the personal archiving habits of the 21st century soldier in an effort to develop new digital capture and preservation technologies to support their needs. He also directs PROTECCT-GLAM, an IMLS-funded project focused on identify climate-change-related risks for GLAMs. Dr. Benoit is also an affiliated faculty member in the LSU College of Art & Design’s Doctor of Design in Cultural Preservation program.
Elizabeth Hansen
Elizabeth Hansen is a creative problem-solver with more than two decades of expertise in archives, museums, history, and media. She joined the Texas Archive of the Moving Image as Managing Director in 2020 and served as the organization’s Outreach and Education Manager from 2008 to 2013. With a career spanning roles in community engagement, media production, and archival research, Hansen has worked for the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, the LBJ Presidential Library, the Bullock Texas State History Museum, Kansas City PBS, the National Educational Telecommunications Association, the Stax Museum of Soul Music, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Hansen’s archival research has enhanced documentaries such as “Winnebago Man,” “Karen Dalton: In My Own Time,” and “See Know Evil.” She holds a master’s degree in media studies from the University of Texas at Austin and a bachelor’s degree in mass communication from Middle Tennessee State University.
Emily Chao
Emily Chao is a filmmaker based in the Bay Area. Her films have screened at the Viennale, IFFR, Sheffield DocFest, BAMPFA, MoMI, Wexner Center for the Arts, and elsewhere. She is a founding member of Black Hole Collective Film Lab in Oakland, CA and co-programmed Light Field, an international exhibition of moving image art from 2017-2024. She is from San Jose, California and earned her MFA in Film/Video at the California Institute of the Arts.
Eric Hoyt
Eric Hoyt is the Kahl Family Professor of Media Production in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on the intersections between media history and the digital humanities. He is the Director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research and Media History Digital Library, which has digitized over 3 million pages of historic books and magazines for open access. He is the author of Hollywood Vault: Film Libraries before Home Video (2014) and Ink-Stained Hollywood: The Triumph of American Cinema’s Trade Press (2022), as well as co-editor of Hollywood and the Law (2015), The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities (2016), and Saving New Sounds: Podcast Preservation and Historiography (2021), and the forthcoming Global Movie Magazine Networks (2025). His work has been supported with over $1.4 million in extramural grants from the NEH, ACLS, NHPRC, and IMLS.
Eva Yuma
Eva Yuma is IndieCollect’s Senior Restoration Colorist where she has restored Solomon Northup’s Odyssey by Gordon Parks, Bitter Cane by Ben Dupuy & Kim Ives, Shadow Magic by Ann Hu, Hairstory by LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Suzanne Suzanne by Camille Billops, Suspect by Darnell Martin, and three short films of Julie Dash. She has worked at IndieCollect since getting her MA from the Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema at Brooklyn College.
Fabio Bedoya
Fabio Bedoya is a Film Restoration Technician and Colorist with extensive experience in digital intermediates. His work spans a range of restoration projects, from preserving Peru’s cinematic heritage to collaborating with major studios and independent filmmakers. As a master trainer at Filmworkz, he demos, trains, and provides support to clients in their film restoration needs, ensuring they effectively utilize the Phoenix suite of restoration tools. He conducts research on color recovery, film decay, and digitization issues using machine learning, and is committed to furthering and improving education in the film restoration space.
George Blood
George Blood graduated from the University of Chicago (1983) with a Bachelors in Music Theory. In addition to his work in preservation he – started his career at WFMT-FM in Chicago over 40 years ago – has recorded over 4,000 live events – was recording engineer for The Philadelphia Orchestra for 21 years – has recorded and edited some 600 syndicated radio programs – has recorded or produced over 250 CDs, 7 of which have been nominated for Grammy Awards – has given over 150 presentations on audiovisual technology and preservation – served two years as program chair for ARSC. He is the only student of pianist Marc-André Hamelin. [to shorten just start here] George Blood Audio/Video/Film/Data has digitized nearly 1.7 million audio, moving image, and computer media from collections around the world. Staff are active in research into workflow, best practices, metadata, authentication, and interchangeability of digital information. George is an active teacher and presenter at conferences, sharing these findings with members of the trade and collections managers. He served on standards committees for ALA and MXF AS-07 (now SMPTE RDD48), and is author of two chapters of IASA TC 06.
Grace Lile
Grace Lile has worked as an audiovisual archivist for over 30 years. In 2004, Grace established the Media Archive at WITNESS.org, where she developed systems, frameworks, and practices to address the unique challenges of human rights audiovisual documentation and archiving. She participated in her first Community Archiving Workshop in 2013. She currently works as an independent consultant.
Guadalupe Martinez
Guadalupe Martinez (they/she) earned an MLIS from San José State University in 2022, and later joined BAVC Media’s 22/23 Preservation Fellowship to learn hands-on digitization for magnetic media. They are currently the Outreach Coordinator at California Revealed, supporting regional Community Archiving Workshops, Memory Labs, and cultural heritage organizations across the state. Their present role brings together elements of memory preservation, public service, and love of shared history.
Hillary Howell
Director of Premium Archival Services for Iron Mountain Media and Archive Services, Hillary Howell, brings an extensive background managing all the aspects of studio and production company collections along with her experience as an entertainment archivist. At Iron Mountain Media and Archive Services, Howell has worked with diverse clients and archives on a number of initiatives including digitization, relocation and creation of collections management policy. While obtaining a Master’s degree in Moving Image Archive Studies from UCLA, Howell interned for the Women in Film Foundation and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Archive which further deepened her passion for archiving in entertainment. Howell’s curated diverse collections of media assets as well as props, costumes, photography and ephemera through her work with New Line Cinema, The Jim Henson Company, Jerry Bruckheimer Films, NBCUniversal and Lionsgate Entertainment. Career highlights include discovering and restoring a Jim Henson animated short called “Alexander the Grape” from a mix of found audio recordings, animated scene trims and storyboards, restoring serial killer props from “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” for display in the Bruckheimer offices; and preserving the John Wick films that can now be enjoyed by future generations.
Hugo Ljungbäck
Hugo Ljungbäck is a filmmaker, archivist, and media scholar whose work examines the intersections of queer art, experimental film and video, media archaeology, and archival studies. He is currently a PhD Student in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, where he is developing a dissertation project on mid-century queer amateur filmmaking, an almost wholly overlooked chapter of the history of queer cinema. He also serves as Co-chair of the Association of Moving Image Archivists’ Small Gauge and Amateur Film Committee and Co-Secretary of Domitor, the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema.
J.M.S. Emberley
J.M.S Emberley is a graduate of the Cinema Studies Program at SUNY Purchase and a founding member of the Purchase Film Archive, a student-run organization dedicated to cataloguing and preserving the school’s media collections.
Jen Miko
Jen Miko is a Film Scanner at Prelinger Archives. She is an ardent archivist with a long history of working with silver-based images. Jen is a graduate of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation, and has worked with many Bay Area film preservation organizations over the years. Recently, in association with the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, she completed full restorations of several silent film titles. She served as Interim Executive Director at the Niles Essanay Film Museum and has also held positions on the archives team at Zoetrope Productions. As co-founder and former principal of Movette Film Transfer her passion for amateur and small-gauge cinema flourished as she accumulated decades of film-handling experience.
Jenai Cutcher
Jenai Cutcher is a tap dancer and the Assistant Curator in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division at the NYPL Library for the Performing Arts. Her creative practice includes dancing, choreographing, teaching, writing, videography, archiving, curating, and researching histories of dance to present in a variety of media. Cutcher has written articles for publications including Dance magazine and The Village Voice, three dance books for children, and Columbus Moves: A Brief History of Contemporary Dance. Her documentary, Thinking On Their Feet: Women of the Tap Renaissance, explores the work of women who resurrected and revolutionized the art of American tap dance and continue to pioneer the field. Cutcher was the founding Executive and Artistic Director of Chicago Dance History Project, a digital archive of original and collected research. She has a BA in English and MFA in Dance, both from The Ohio State University.
Jenny Hsu
Jenny Hsu received her Master’s degree from NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program in May 2024. She is currently a Time-Based Media Conservation Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she works on the ingest and documentation of new acquisitions and artworks within the collection. During her graduate studies, she interned at La MaMa E.T.C., Video Data Bank, and NYU Libraries, and served as a Graduate Archival Assistant in NYU’s Cinema Studies Department. Jenny’s research focuses on electronic art, video art, performance, installations, and complex media works. She is particularly interested in improving documentation processes and finding ways to make ingest, documentation, and quality control workflows more efficient and comprehensive in cultural heritage institutions.
Jim Hubbard
Jim Hubbard has been making films since 1974. Among his many films are Nostalgia, United in Anger, Elegy in the Streets, Two Marches, The Dance and Memento Mori, which won the Ursula for Best Short Film at the Hamburg Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. He co-founded MIX – the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film/Video and the ACT UP Oral History Project. Under the auspices of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, he created The AIDS Activist Video Collection at the New York Public Library. He has curated film series for the Guggenheim Museum, the New York Public Library and the Museum of Modern Art.
Jimi Jones
Jimi Jones is the archivist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the United States. He is also adjunct instructor at the School of Information Sciences at Illinois. For the past decade Jimi has been studying standards for moving image digitization—the social aspects of their design, the technical choices that drive their development. He is currently researching TV horror hosts and their place in American television broadcast history.
Josh Thorud
Josh Thorud is a Multimedia Teaching and Learning Librarian at the University of Virginia Library. In this role, he designs and teaches audio/video and digital art instructional sessions, including software, equipment, media literacy, and digital storytelling, as well as consults with instructors about course design for media. His background is in film production and digital art, and he was previously a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and Coe College. As a video editor, screenwriter, and artist, his work has been showcased internationally, spanning the US, UK, Mexico, Germany, Italy, Columbia, Russia, and Serbia at competitions such as BFI London Film Festival, Austin Film Festival, Slamdance, and many more. He received his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University.
Justin Lemons
Justin Lemons earned a BFA in Drawing and Painting and an MIS in Library Science, both from the University of North Texas. As a Library Science student, Justin studied special materials preservation and spent time at the Library of Congress’ National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, VA as a Junior Fellow in the Recorded Sound Division. He is currently the Preservation and Acquisitions Librarian for the University of North Texas Special Collections department and owns and operates a mostly analog recording studio out of his home in Denton, TX.
Kaitlyn Palone
Kaitlyn Palone is a Metadata & Cataloging Librarian from the University of Central Oklahoma. As well as her duties as a cataloger she also is in charge of mending the library’s collections, and coordinates the campus zine library. She is a member of the Zine Thesaurus Management Collective for the Anchor Archive Zine Library, and has been involved with CAW since 2023 when she participated in the ToT program’s second cohort.
Karen Cariani
Karen Cariani, is the David O. Ives Executive Director of the GBH Archives and GBH Project Director for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a collaboration with the Library of Congress to preserve and provide a centralized on-line access to content created by public media. Karen has 40+ years of television production, project and archival management experience and was project director for many projects focused on providing access to digital audiovisual collections online and long-term digital preservation. Among many activities, she has served on the AMIA board, Digital Commonwealth board, and the National Stewardship Digital Alliance (NDSA) Coordinating Committee and chaired the Levels of Preservation revision WG. Karen is committed to push new technology to its limits to allow historical cultural materials more available for public use. She is active in the archive community and professional organizations and passionate about the use of media archives and digital library collections for education.
Kate Dollenmayer
Kate Dollenmayer lives and works on Lisjan (Ohlone) land in Richmond, California. Currently a film archivist at Prelinger Archives, Kate previously worked at the Academy Film Archive and the Wende Museum of the Cold War. Kate is also a filmmaker and a volunteer at Home Movie Days and Community Archiving Workshops.
Kelli Shay Hix
Kelli Shay Hix is the Director of the projects, Hands On Training in Analog Video Playback Equipment and Mapping the Magnetic Media Landscape at BAVC Media. She is also a core member of the Community Archiving Workshop collective (CAW), and a Fulbright Specialist working with community archives in Serbia. Her past clients include the Smithsonian Institution, the National Geographic Society, and the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.
Kevin Rice
Kevin Rice is a cinema engineer and filmmaker based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 2012, he co-founded the non-profit organization Process Reversal, an org dedicated to film preservation through the practice of making and exhibiting films on film. Through its touring series of screenings and workshops, he became heavily involved with the artist-run film lab scene. Since 2019, he has been the technical director of Milwaukee Film and its associated film festivals and historic cinemas. He currently works to design and integrate cinema systems through his company Star & Shutter.
Krista Hollis
Krista M. Hollis is the Assistant Archivist at The Menil Collection. The Menil has an extensive Film and Media Collection with records dating back to 1874. Krista holds a B.A. in Art History from Texas State University (2018), an MLIS with a Certificate in Archival Studies from Louisiana State University (2023), and is a LEED Green Associate. Krista chairs the SSA Ad Hoc Committee on Sustainability, sits on the Board of Archivists of the Houston Area, and volunteers at Orange Show Center for Visionary Art as their Special Collections Manager. Research interests include sustainability, reparative practices, and modern/contemporary art.
Kristin Lipska
Kristin Lipska is an archivist specializing in audiovisual media and digitization workflows. She is currently Digital Asset Manager at the Prelinger Archives working on a three-year film digitization project. Previously she was Digital and Media Archivist at the San Francisco Symphony and Project Coordinator at California Revealed. She earned a Masters of Library and Information Science from San Jose State University and developed skills in video digitization and QC as an intern in the preservation department of the Bay Area Video Coalition. Kristin has contributed to several Home Movie Day events in the San Francisco Bay Area since 2012 as both a film inspector and as a projectionist.
Kirsten Larvick
Kirsten Larvick is the
Director of Special Projects at IndieCollect, where she helps filmmakers develop strategies for preserving their work through the Legacy Services initiative. Since 2009, she has co-chaired the Women’s Film Preservation Fund (WFPF), which is dedicated to protecting the contributions of women in cinema. Kirsten founded the Al Larvick Fund, in honor of her grandfather, to preserve and digitize home movies, amateur films, and community recordings. The Fund emphasizes participatory history, focusing on cataloging, contextualizing, and sharing personal archives. Kirsten also produces documentary restorations, and programs screenings and digitization events at cinemas, museums, and libraries.
Kristen Muenz
Kristen (they/she) is the inaugural archivist at the Wexner Center for the Arts within the Ohio State University. Their professional interests include, as you might expect, the archiving of audiovisual materials, but also the development of sustainable solo archivist practices, preservation of community archives, and promotion of personal archiving.
Kyeongmin Rim
Kyeongmin Rim is a PhD student working on computational semantics. After working at an industry-leading NLP company in Korea, he returned to academia pursuing Computational Linguistics at Brandeis University. As a doctoral research assistant, he’s been working on various projects, building multi-modal and multi-media semantic models for artificial intelligence systems. He is lead software developer of the CLAMS platform.
Lance Watsky
Lance Watsky is a seasoned Motion Picture Archivist with nearly thirty years of experience in preserving, digitizing, and licensing film collections for museums, libraries, archives, and companies. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts from the University of South Florida and a Master of Arts in Preservation and Restoration of Motion Pictures and Recorded Sound from California State University, Chico. He has been a member of the Association of Moving Image Archivists since 1997. Currently the lead archive sales representative at Filmic Technologies, Lance helps libraries and archives develop preservation, digitization and storage strategies. He lives in Decatur, Georgia.
Larry Blake
Larry Blake is a supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer of feature films. He has mixed more than 65 narrative features since 1989, and was also the supervising sound editor on 55 of them. Included in this number are 33 features and four television seasons with Steven Soderbergh, plus multiple films from Victor Nunez, David Gordon Green, and the Duplass Brothers. In addition, he has mixed 19 feature documentaries. In 2013 won both Emmy and Cinema Audio Society awards for Best Sound for a Miniseries or a Movie for his work on Behind the Candelabra. He has written extensively on film sound since 1981 and will be publishing separate anthologies of his columns and features, in addition to the autobiography of film sound great Murray Spivack. First up is a book he’s writing on the digital archiving of motion pictures, Solving the Digital Dilemma.
Laura Horak
Laura Horak is Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University and director of the Transgender Media Lab and Transgender Media Portal. She investigates the history of transgender and queer film and media in the United States, Canada, and Sweden. She is co-curator of the 99-film Bluray set Cinema’s First Nasty Women (Kino Lorber, 2022), author of Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressing Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema (Rutgers 2016), and co-editor of Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space (Indiana 2014), Unwatchable (Rutgers 2019), Somatechnics 8.1 (2018) on trans/cinematic/bodies, a 2022 “In Focus” section of Journal of Cinema and Media Studies on transing cinema and media studies, and a 2024 issue of Reviews in Digital Humanities on trans and queer digital humanities.
Libby Savage Hopfauf
Libby Savage Hopfauf (she/her) Libby Savage Hopfauf has been the Program Manager/Audiovisual Archivist at Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound (MIPoPS) and the Audiovisual Archivist at the Seattle Municipal Archives since 2015. She received a Master’s in Library and Information Science from the University of Washington and a Bachelor of the Arts in Creative Writing with a minor in Sociology from Western Washington University. She is passionate about creating resources that provide intuitive use of open-source tools, making the digitizing process accessible to archivists (with a wide variety of skill-levels) to ensure the sustainability of institutions to preserve their videotape and conquer the magnetic media crisis.
Linda Tadic
Linda Tadic is Founder/CEO of Digital Bedrock, a managed digital preservation service. Her over 35 years’ experience includes positions at HBO, the Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia, ARTstor, and Pacific Film Archive. She has also taught as an Adjunct Professor at two major graduate programs focused on audiovisual archiving and preservation: UCLA’s Department of Information Studies, teaching a course on Digital Asset Management; and at NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program, teaching a course on Collection Management. She is a founding member and former president of AMIA. Linda consults and lectures on digital asset management, audiovisual and digital preservation, metadata, and the impact of digital preservation on the environment. Linda was the recipient of the 2021 SMPTE James A. Lindner Archival Technology Medal in recognition of her leadership, research, and work in digital asset management, audiovisual and digital preservation, copyright, metadata, and the environmental impact of digital preservation.
Lindsay Erin Miller
Lindsay Erin Miller (they/she) is a media archivist, writer, and pop culture enthusiast. Originally from North Carolina, they currently work as the digital asset manager for Vinegar Syndrome. Lindsay holds a B.A. in Mass Communications from UNC Asheville and a M.A. in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from NYU. In their spare time, they enjoy collecting zines, hanging out with their cat, and reminding others that pornography is not a substitute for sex education.
Liza Palmer
Liza Palmer, librarian, is managing editor for the Association of Moving Image Archivists’ The Moving Image; co-editor-in-chief of the magazine Film Matters; and contributing editor for Film International. She is an academic publishing specialist in Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and is particularly proud of her 2022-2023 Kathleen Berkeley Inconvenient Woman Award from UNCW’s Gender Studies and Research Center.
Lori Felker
Lori Felker is a filmmaker, teacher, programmer, and performer. Her films study the ineloquent, frustrating, and chaotic qualities of human interaction and have explored empathy, discontinuity, grief, and multiple dimensions. She eschews any particular style or genre in favor of letting content and concerns guide form. She loves every facet of filmmaking and has worked as a cinematographer, editor, and/or actor for various artists and directors and has programmed for the likes of the Chicago Underground Film Festival and Slamdance and was a projectionist at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Her award-winning short films and one feature documentary have screen internationally, and she is the recipient of various grants/fellowships including a Fulbright (Berlin) and a Wexner Center Residency. She lives in Chicago and is an Assistant Professor at DePaul University.
Lucy Talbot Allen
Lucy Talbot Allen is a current second-year student in the NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program. Lucy worked as an archive intern at Vinegar Syndrome in Summer 2024, working extensively with the Dr. Ted collection, which will form the basis of their M.A. thesis. Lucy has also written for publications such as Screen Slate and Little White Lies, and has programmed screenings at Whammy! Analog Media in Los Angeles and the Film-makers’ Cooperative in New York.
Maggie Hennefeld
Maggie Hennefeld is Professor of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is the author of Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema (Columbia UP, 2024) and co-curator of the 4-disc DVD/Blu-ray set Cinema’s First Nasty Women (Kino Lorber, 2022).
Marisa Hicks-Alcaraz
Dr. Marisa Hicks-Alcaraz (she/they) is a Lecturer in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and co-founder of the Memory Lab at the Urbana Makerspace. Her research centers on U.S. Latina moving image production, anticolonial feminist theory, community archiving, and home movie digital preservation. Their writing has been published in journals including the International Journal of Information, Diversity & Inclusion, the Journal of Feminist Media Histories, and Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities.
Mark Gray
Mr. Gray is recognized as a serial entrepreneur in Media and Entertainment technology. Throughout his career, he has founded companies and developed innovative products and technologies for the Broadcast, Professional Television, and Digital Media markets. Before his founding of GrayMeta, Mr. Gray held C-level positions at Pinnacle, AVID, Chyron, Sony, and other leading companies. His pioneering work is utilized by every television station and production facility around the globe. The development of the SAMMA migration process earned a prestigious technical Emmy. Mr. Gray holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tennessee, a Master of Arts degree in Communication from St. Louis University, and is a graduate of the School of Executive Development at Babson College’s graduate school of business. Additionally, Mr. Gray has served on the boards of several companies, including EGT, Telco Television Corporation, and Giant Studios. He was recently honored as a Fellow of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE).
Mary Huelsbeck
Mary Huelsbeck has been the Assistant Director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since March 2012. She has over twenty-five years of experience managing film, videotape, audio, photograph, manuscript and three dimensional object collections in museums, libraries, and archives. She is a long-time member of the Association of Moving Image Archivists.
Matt St. John
Matt St. John is a manuscript archivist at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, where he leads processing and digitization for the “Expanding Film Culture’s Field of Vision” project. He holds a PhD in film from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Matthew Wilcox
Matthew Wilcox is the Audiovisual Archivist at the Michigan State University Libraries. Matthew has been an advocate for the WKAR and WMSB educational kinescopes and films, and he is also responsible for the management of the MSU Library’s Media Preservation Lab. With the aid of a recently acquired government grant, the lab has been expanded and the kinescopes and films are currently being preserved and digitized in-house.
Megan Needels
Megan Needels is an archivist based in San Francisco, California. They are a graduate of the media archival studies MLIS program at UCLA and have worked at a number of San Francisco Bay Area archives including Canyon Cinema, San Francisco Cinematheque, Oddball Films, and the GLBT Historical Society.
Melissa Dollman
Melissa Dollman earned her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) in American Studies in 2021 and has a Master’s in Moving Image Archive Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. She has worked professionally as an audiovisual archivist, adjunct faculty, fellow, exhibit developer, and researcher for cultural heritage institutions including Women In Film Foundation, UCLA Film and Television Archive, Academy Film Archive, Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, State Archives of North Carolina, North Carolina State University, UNC and its Southern Oral History Program, Tribesourcing Southwest Film, and is co-founder and CFO of Deserted Films, a home movie archive in Palm Springs, CA. Between 2016 and 2020 she was a director of the board for the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA). Her publications cover home movies, digital humanities, public access TV, and the intersection of women’s and PR history.
Michael Marlatt
Michael Marlatt (he/him) is a disabled film archivist, archival accessibility consultant, and archival producer based in New Brunswick, Canada. Michael received his PhD at York University in the Communication & Culture program where he examined accessibility gaps in moving image archival education. Michael hosts archival accessibility workshops with various types of archives including broadcasting, government, and archival professional organizations.
Mitch Peyser
After many years mining archives to create and promote classic music and video collections for Time Life, Mitch is now curating, creating, launching and managing YouTube channels including The Smothers Brothers, Bob Hope, and Tennessee Ernie Ford. The Smothers Brothers Channel has grown from launch in 2023 to 190,000 subscribers along with several viral clips with hundreds of millions of views. For Time Life, Mitch generated hundreds of millions of $$s through all channels of direct to consumer marketing including web, email, and direct response television. He has fostered long-term successful business relationships with major brands including Disney, The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, The Grand Ole Opry, The Academy of Country Music and The Country Music Association.
Nilson Carroll
Nilson Carroll is the Assistant Curator and Preservation Specialist at Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York. At VSW, Nilson manages the Media Transfer Lab and specializes in the preservation of videotapes. Nilson has worked to preserve and make accessible large portions of the VSW Video Collection, including tapes from the Portable Channel (1970s) and TV Dinner (1980s-90s) collections, both of which cover prescient topics including racial justice, universal healthcare, reproductive rights, the AIDS epidemic, and others. Nilson is also an artist, game designer, curator, and educator working at the intersection of experimental film/video, video games, and queer theory/embodiment. Nilson is committed to accessibility of information and art making, and believes in working toward a future of shared resources, community participation, and lowered barriers to education. Nilson is the co-founder of the DIY mutual aid project the Queer Games Bundle, which directly supports hundreds of LGBTQIA2S+ artists from around the world annually.
Olivia Babler
Olivia Babler manages film digitization operations at Chicago Film Archives, a non-profit dedicated to preserving films from the Midwestern U.S. She is active in all stages of collections processing at CFA, including inspection, digitization, curation, and cataloging. Prior to joining CFA in 2017, she earned her M.A. in Film + Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University. She caught the film preservation bug as an intern at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research while an undergrad at the University of Wisconsin.
Oscar Becher
Oscar Becher is the Director of The Vinegar Syndrome Film Archive and the Vault Manager/Archivist at Vinegar Syndrome, a film restoration and distribution company focused on the preservation of historically overlooked areas of cinema, with a particular emphasis on genre films. He has supervised the buildout and expansion of VS’ in-house climate-controlled film archive while personally processing all incoming film elements. Since starting at VS in 2021, he has inventoried and re-housed over 30,000 reels of film and has overseen projects related to the locating and recovery of endangered elements, repair and prep for scanning, and has produced instructional and educational videos on film handling and element identification. He graduated in 2020 from the Selznick School of Film Preservation and in 2023 from NYU’s Moving Image and Preservation Program.
Owen Gottlieb
Owen Gottlieb Associate Professor of Interactive Games and Media at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Founder and Director of the Interactive, Media, and Learning Lab at RIT. His research traverses interactive media for learning, narrative design, instructional media history, and interactive media for healing and wellness. His learning games have been featured at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, IndieCade, Meaningful Play, and Now Play This London. He is currently working on a monograph on the history of ITV in the US and Canada in the 70s and 80s, and its implications for interactive media in the classroom today.
Patricia Ledesma Villon
Patricia Ledesma Villon is the Bentson Archivist and Assistant Curator of the Moving Image department of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she oversees the preservation of the Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection. She has processed audiovisual collections and worked on archival initiatives for the Prelinger Archives, the Center for Asian American Media’s “Memories to Light” home movie project, filmmaker and scholar Trinh T. Minh-ha, and the Philippine Film Archive. Her archival practices focus on the intersections of collections and public curation, photochemical filmmaking and preservation, theories of audiovisual archiving, digital preservation, and artist-made cinema and exhibition. Patricia holds an MLIS with a specialization in Media Archival Studies from UCLA. She is also a member and co-organizer of Light Field, an annual exhibition of recent and historical moving image art on film in the San Francisco Bay Area, and serves on the Board of Directors of Canyon Cinema Foundation.
Peter Kaufman
Peter B. Kaufman is Senior Development Officer at MIT Open Learning. Educated at Cornell and Columbia, he is the author of The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge (Seven Stories Press, 2021) and The Moving Image: A User’s Manual (The MIT Press, 2025). An educator, publisher, and documentary film producer, he has served as Associate Director of Columbia University’s Center for Teaching and Learning; co-chair of the JISC Film & Sound Think Tank; co-chair of the Copyright Committee of the Association of Moving Image Archivists; a member of the Scholar Advisory Committee of WGBH’s American Archive of Public Broadcasting; a member of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities and Social Sciences; and a long-time consultant to the Library of Congress’s Packard Campus for Audiovisual Conservation.
Prue Castles
Prue Castles is the Conservation Manager at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA). Graduating with a Masters in Conservation of Cultural Materials from the University of Canberra and working in the museum sector she now oversees the conservation activities at the NFSA ranging from film to artefacts. NFSA received funding to expand and refit the nitrate film storage facility, Prue is a team member on this project.
Rai Terry
Rai Mckinley Terry (they/them) is an audiovisual artist and archivist. Rai began working with SSHMP in the Summer of 2021 as an Association of Moving Image Archivists Pathways fellow. Rai is interested in the power and preservation of home movies, especially those recorded on videotape. They have an B.A. in African and African American Arts from Brandeis University and an M.A. in Public Humanities from Brown University.
Robert Byrne
Robert Byrne is film preservationist and restorer specializing in early cinema and films of the silent era. Working with film archives and collections worldwide he has led restorations and resurrections of more than forty feature films and numerous short subjects. He has lectured at the Library of Congress, University College Cork, Queen’s University Belfast, The Reel Thing Symposium, and numerous AMIA and FIAF technical symposiums. He is co-author of FIAF Image Restoration, Manipulation, Treatment, and Ethics and publishes regularly on the topics of motion picture restoration and preservation. His work appears in the volume Films that Sell: Moving Pictures and Advertising, and he is co-author of Discovering Lost Films of Georges Méliès in fin-de-siècle Flip Books (1896–1901) and Tales from the Vaults: Film Technology over the Years and across Continents. Rob holds a MA in Presentation and Preservation of the Moving Image from University of Amsterdam. He has served on the boards of the Global Film Initiative, Friends of the Oakland Fox Theatre, and the Castro Theatre Conservancy, and for more than twenty years has served on the board of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. He has recently founded the San Francisco Film Preserve, a nonprofit organization focused on restoring, preserving, and providing access to cinematic treasures across all generations.
Russell Zych
Russell Zych currently serves as a Media Preservation Technician at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Russell is also a Research Assistant for the Cinema’s First Nasty Women project and a volunteer admin for TAPE Los Angeles, a nonprofit that provides low-cost video digitization services, workshops, and other resources related to analog a/v media. Russell’s personal and professional interests include small gauge/amateur film, silent/early cinema, community archives, histories of technology and obsolescence, critical information studies, data studies, platform studies, digital preservation, and video games.
Ruta Abolins
Ruta Abolins is Director of the Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia Libraries. She has worked in moving image archives for the past 30 years. She currently manages a collection of over 350,000 analog audiovisual items and over 200,000 digital files with collections ranging from news to home movies to the Peabody Awards Collection. She has written and presented on the importance of local news content and the licensing of archival content for documentary use to help support archives.
Sam Fleishman
Sam Fleishman (they/them) is project manager for the Autistic Voices Oral History Project. Sam is a writer, researcher, and multimedia artist with a focus on disability advocacy and documentary storytelling. After being professionally identified as Autistic at 24, they began a deep educational pursuit of neurodiversity and disability studies. Currently, Sam works in autism research at the MGH Lurie Center for Autism, and teaches accessible theater to youth with disabilities, integrating their lived Autistic experiences and professional expertise. They have significant experience in communications, project management and design, with a specific interest in healthcare advancement and accessibility.
Sandra Joy Aguilar
Sandra oversees metadata and indexing at University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education, an online educational resource which showcases over 56,000 video life histories of individuals who survived the Holocaust or other genocides. She works with a global multilingual staff of indexers and archivists who use a custom thesaurus to apply terms to one minute video segments which provide deep scholarly access to the stories of survivors. She holds an MLIS from UCLA and a BA in Film and Media Studies from UCSB.
Sandra Schulberg
Sandra Schulberg is President of IndieCollect and producer of its restorations. Previously she restored her father’s documentary, Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today, and authored the monograph “Filmmakers for the Production,” which was turned into the eponymous documentary film, now in release through Kino Lorber. With the Academy Film Archive, Library of Congress, Dutch Nationaal Archief, and Germany’s BundesFilmarchiv, she preserved more than 25 Marshall Plan films, curated extensive MP film programs for the Berlin and New York Film Festivals, and authored the monograph, “Selling Democracy: Films of the Marshall Plan, 1948-1953.” A longtime media activist, she founded the IFP, co-founded First Run Features, started the IndieCollect campaign. For three decades she financed & produced indie movies, winning the Sundance Grand Prize for Waiting for the Moon, and Oscar nominations for Quills. For 16 years, she taught Feature Film Financing & International Co-Production at Columbia University’s graduate film school. For her contributions to American independent cinema, she has honored with the Berlinale Camera, Spirit Award and Gotham Award.
Simon O’Riordan
Simon O’Riordan is the Program Manager for Metadata Services for Emory University Libraries. He has been with Emory since 2014. He earned his Masters in Library Science from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He also has an MA in history from Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario) and completed his undergraduate studies in history and theology at Seattle University. His role at the Emory University Libraries includes providing metadata expertise for digital scholarship, digitization and other metadata-dependent efforts as well as provide consultation on various metadata topics.
Staci Hogsett
Staci Hogsett is the Head of Collection Services for the UCLA Film & Television Archive. She leads the organization, circulation, and processing of the Archive’s collection of over 500,000 items. Staci received her BA in English and Film Studies from the University of Nebraska and her MA through the UCLA Moving Image Archive Studies program.
Stephanie Neel
Stephanie Neel (she/her/hers) is an archivist based in New York City, working primarily with performing arts and photography collections. She has been the archivist at Mark Morris Dance Group in Brooklyn since 2017, and has worked with a number of performing arts companies and artist estates as a project manager and consultant for grant writing, collection processing, digitization, and database advisement. Stephanie is a member of the Archives Funding Coalition for Dance/USA and serves on the Programming Committee for Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York.
Syd Perkins
Syd Perkins is a 2017 graduate of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation certificate program. She has interned and worked at multiple institutions over the past twelve plus years, including the Moving Image Research Collections, Yale Film Archive, and Metropolis Post. She has experience operating numerous film scanners, handling innumerable film formats, and enjoys experimenting with image processing software in new ways. She has collaborated with Ben Model and is currently collaborating with Ben Solovey on digital restoration projects. She is an unemployed trans woman.
Tara Merenda Nelson
Tara Merenda Nelson is the Curator and Director of Public Programs at Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY, where she oversees a collection of over 10,000 16mm film and early video titles. Tara is the lead programmer for the VSW Salon series, and is the Managing Editor for VSW Press.
Tim Lake
Tim Lake is the Director of Preservation at BAVC Media, managing analog media digitization services, as well as administering the Community Preservation Hub in San Francisco. He works to demystify the technical hurdles of preservation, ensuring long-term access for independent artists and large media organizations alike. Tim joined BAVC Media in October 2019, following audiovisual preservation internships with Smithsonian (Archives of American Art, Folkways Recordings) and the D.C. Punk Archive. He has a Master’s of Audio Engineering from American University, and spent 10 years performing, promoting, and recording music in the Washington, D.C. community.
Walter Forsberg
Walter Forsberg is Curator of Audiovisual Media at Smithsonian Libraries and Archives. His co-edited book on Mexican microcinemas, “Cine-Espacios,” was published by Canyon Cinema in 2023. Walter’s first AMIA was 2008 in Savannah, where he got to meet Rick Prelinger and Sam Kula IRL (!).
Winand (Yizhou Wei)
Yizhou Wei (Winand) holds a BA in Theatre, Film, Television, and Literature from Xiamen University and an MLIS from National Taiwan University. Currently pursuing a PhD at Xiamen University, he specializes in film preservation and restoration and serves as a research assistant at the university’s Film Archive Studies Center. In 2024, he attended the FIAF Congress in Bangkok as an auditor, presented a paper on Divergent Approaches in Film Preservation Education Across the Strait at the 28th SEAPAVAA Conference, and participated in the FIAF Film Restoration Summer School in Bologna. His doctoral advisor, Ray Jiing, formerly served as Director of the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (1989-1996). His dissertation proposal, titled A Study on a Decentralized Model for Film Preservation, aims to explore how film preservation can generate cultural significance in the Sinophone world, extending beyond technical practice. He envisions film preservation as a tool for social progress and empowerment, especially within contemporary mainland China, where advancing such cultural initiatives is challenging yet vital.
Yesenia Perez
Yesenia Perez (she/they) is a Processing Conservator with the UCLA Film & Television Archive. She received her MLIS from UCLA with a specialization in Media Archival Studies. In the past, she has held roles with the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives, the UCLA Center for Oral History Research, and the Margaret Herrick Library. Eager to merge her interest in archival work and community engagement, she is currently a member of the 2024 Community Archiving Workshop Training of Trainers cohort.
Zach Rutland
My name is Zach Rutland – I am an archivist for the Skid Row History Museum and Archive (LA Poverty Dept.), going on 5 years. My main drive is community-based work as it relates to archival practice, use and sustainability for the neighborhood of Skid Row. For the past 6 years, I have contracted work for archival projects and DAM implementations. I graduated with my MLIS from UCLA in 2020 with a specialization in media studies.